The repairable part of a tyre is a band across the middle of the tread, and it is narrower than people expect. Roughly the central three quarters of the tread width may be repaired; the outer portion on each side may not, and that exclusion is not arbitrary. Near the edges the tread is transitioning into the shoulder, which is the part of the casing doing the hardest flexing, and a patch bonded there is being peeled at its edges on every rotation. So the useful question about a nail is never whether it is in the tread. It is how far across the tread it sits.
Shoulder wear is what turns this from a measurement into a judgement. If the outer edges of a tyre have worn away faster than the middle, from alignment knocked out or from a long spell running soft, then the tyre is already telling you it has been working its edges hard. An injury sitting near the boundary of the band on a tyre like that is a poor bet even when it technically measures inside it, and the tyre itself is close to needing replacement anyway. We will measure it properly and give you the honest version, including the times when a legal repair is not a sensible purchase.
The usual routine is to pump it up, hope, and drive somewhere to be told whether it can be saved. We come to the car in SW8, take the wheel off where it stands and inspect the tyre inside and out before anybody commits to anything. Old tyres leave Albert Embankment, Lansdowne Green and SW8 with us, every time. You watch it happen in the Wandsworth Road area, or at the kerb in South Lambeth. The SW8 postcode and a street in South Lambeth: that is enough.
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The gyratory means constant steering and constant kerb proximity, and the potholed approaches knock alignment out often enough that worn outer edges are a common sight in SW8. Those edges are the first thing to look at when you are wondering whether a nail can be dealt with, because they tell you both where the band ends and how much life the tyre has left. A repair in a tyre with the shoulders gone is honest work on something that will need replacing shortly anyway, and it is fair to know that before you decide.
A nail measured just within the repairable area on a wide tyre. The shoulders on that tyre were visibly more worn than the centre, so the honest advice was replacement rather than a repair at the edge of what is allowed.
A car off Kennington Lane had good depth down the centre and almost nothing on both outer shoulders, which is an alignment problem wearing out an otherwise healthy tyre from the outside in.
A screw dead in the middle of the tread on a tyre with even wear across its width. That is the easy version of this job and it was repaired and back on the car in a bay.
Within the central portion of the tread, about three quarters of its width, with the outer part of each side excluded. The exclusion exists because the tyre flexes increasingly as you move outward, and a patch in a flexing area works loose at its edges rather than staying bonded.
Not by itself. Being in the tread and being inside the repairable band are two different things, and on a wide tyre the difference can be a couple of inches that look like nothing. It gets measured from the tread edges rather than judged by eye.
It often does. Worn shoulders say the outer parts of that tyre have been carrying more than their share, and they also mean the tyre has less life ahead of it than the middle suggests. A repair near the boundary on a tyre in that state is legal work on something that needs replacing soon.
Usually alignment, sometimes long periods of underinflation, occasionally both. It is worth sorting, because otherwise the replacement wears out the same way. We will show you the pattern on the old tyre so you know whether you are looking at a wear issue or a geometry issue.
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